5 Best Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for Your Blog Post

Let’s get one thing straight – it’s not enough to just write informative blog posts.

It’s one thing to give the right information to people. It’s another to encourage them to take action.

While there’s no denying that you are in the business of providing value to your audience, you also need to get back something in return. Whether it’s getting them to subscribe to your email list, click on a button that points to another page on your site, or purchase a product from you, you need readers to commit to your call to action at the end of each post.

If you’re not doing this, then you’re letting potential subscribers or customers walk away from your site, never to be seen from again! What’s the point of doing SEO or marketing your site if you’re just letting them walk all over your site?

Okay, so I may be exaggerating a bit. But my point still stands – you need to convert people after they read your post. Therefore, below are conversion rate optimization tips to help you mobilize your blog post readers towards your desired action:

1. Use social media to gate your content

It’s no longer enough to just stick floating social media buttons on the side or bottom of your post. While people still share your posts using these buttons if they like your post, there’s no incentive for others to do the same. You need to make them feel obligated to share your post on social media so more people see your content.

One way of doing this is by using the Social Locker plugin to lock certain parts of your content. To unlock them, users need to share the post on Facebook, Twitter, or others. Once shared, readers can now access the locked part of the post.

To make this work, make sure that the locked part bears value to readers. You can’t just lock random paragraphs on the post using the plugin and expect to drive lots of social shares. You need to lock parts of content that people can’t miss strategically so there’s incentive for them to share the post using Social Locker.

2. Create incentive emails to boost subscribers

Similar to social sharing, you need a proverbial carrot to dangle in front of your rabbit readers for them to take a bite and sign up to your email list. Sending them “weekly newsletter” or “latest blog posts” are no longer viable incentives. You must provide an incentive that creates urgency from readers so they can effectively join your list.

One way of doing this is by creating content upgrades. These are exclusive pieces of content available on your website if visitors subscribe to your email. After signing up, people will automatically download the file from their browsers or they will receive an email confirming their subscription before they get the file.

Content upgrades may come in the form of a blog post or e-book that’s not available for public viewing. You can also make content upgrades out of checklists, tip list, and others.

There are tools like accommodate content upgrades such as OptinMonster and Vyper. You can integrate most of these tools with your email marketing platform so you can funnel people who signed up for your content upgrades in your list.

3. Create clickable tweets to engage Twitter users

There will be nuggets of advice sprinkled all over your blog post. You may not only want people to see it but you want them to share it to the world.

To do this, you need to create clickable tweets on your post. Instead of copying the text, logging in their Twitter, and pasting the text before hitting “Send,” you can make the process much easier for them with a single click. Using a tool like TweetDis or Better Click to Tweet (both for WordPress), you can create the tweets visitors will click within the content so they can also share it to their social network. TweetDis gives you the ability to change the appearance of the tweet box to to make your clickable tweets much more compelling.

For non-WordPress users, you need to manually create the clickable tweet and use ClicktoTweet to generate the link.

4. Ask questions at the end of the post

This is one of the few conversion rate optimization tips that won’t require you to use any tool. By simply asking people a question to answer at the end of each post, you give readers the platform to voice out their opinions and insights regarding your post.

Make sure that the question is highly relevant to the post so you can generate more comments. You can also mix up the formatting of this section of your post. Use different colors and font sizes for the question to make it much more visible for your readers. Last, you can incentivize people who leave comments by using their answers on your next blog post or something to that effect.

5. Use the sidebar to your advantage

If you’re using WordPress, you can include a sidebar as part of your post layout. You can include different calls to action here to generate more conversions for your site. However, since each post will be different, you need to create customized sidebars for each post so you can show visitors highly targeted CTAs.

Two plugins that will help you here are the Q2W3 Fixed Widget and Content Aware Sidebars. The former allows you to create a fixed widget that scrolls along with the page so it remains visible no matter how far readers go down your post. The latter helps you make different sidebars for certain posts. You can activate which sidebars will appear on each post.

To use both plugins to great effect, you need to feature a killer offer on your fixed widget section for a specific topic on your post. For example, if you’re a blogger covering different topics about digital marketing, you can create different sidebars for SEO, content marketing, social media, and others. For the SEO sidebar, you can feature an affiliate banner of an SEO tool on the fixed widget section. If you cover content marketing, you can create a free e-course on how to develop an effective content marketing for small businesses.

The idea is to create a laser-focused sidebar that appeal to different segments of your audience for better conversions.

Did these conversion rate optimization tips help you?

There are other ways on how you can grow your conversion rate and enjoy more engaged readers and customers of your blog. However, the ones featured above should be enough to help you get started.

If you know other conversion rate optimization tips that others can use on their blog, please share them by commenting below!